My first thought - which I am assuming is what you meant by call a lawyer - is to take very specific guidance from your lawyer on the pros and likely cons of these 3 options and your interests. Most likely, bc there is no win-win in these situations legally, it will come down to his/her best advice on the most likely legal outcomes based on your priorities and the hills you are prepared to die on in terms of time, cost etc.
Fwiw I do think you should reply to the email bc legal stuff rarely gets easier if one doesn’t reply. And it makes you look like an a$$ to lawyers and judges if you do lol. But I think you should simply reply by saying that you will be taking legal advice and that you or your lawyer will be in touch when you have had time to consider. You may want to ask for the contact details of her lawyer for future communication about options. And offer to provide the contact details for your lawyer if you are ready to do sol If nothing else, this acknowledges her email and demonstrates that you are taking this seriously and reasonably. (And from here on imho any written communication should always be done imagining what it might look like in front of an unknown future judge and with an eye to protecting yourself from counter claims bc divorce processes often fail to bring out the best in people, sometimes in previously unimaginable ways.)
I would encourage you to stop listening to, or caring much about, anything she says about her feelings or justifications now. The same holds true for sharing yours. Imho once a marriage gets into legal water, the landscape changes from personal to business. It is what it is, regardless of how anyone feels about how it is if that makes sense.
Now is time for you to dig deep and consider all of your available options and which of them will serve you and your kids best in the longer term. That often means thinking hard about what is really swallow-able for you, and how you swallow things you might not wish to swallow if it looks like you have to. But you DO have options, more than those three actually….but all options come with some degree of predictable consequences. Your lawyer can inform you about the legal ones, maybe some of the financial ones even; the others you will have to consider for yourself.
I suspect the toughest thing for you is that you are going to have to swallow a few things you really really don’t want to. And we get that bc most of us have been there. The first is that your marriage as it was is over and this is the way that it is ending by your wife’s choice. At least as far as you can see right now. The second is that you are going to have to coparent in some way and have less time with your children than you do now. The third is that, unless you can afford to buy her out and set in motion ways to do so, you are not going to be able to continue to live in your current house. These are big painful losses to swallow but they are predictable effects of separation and/or divorce. They won’t get any easier to swallow through avoidance, so imho do whatever you need to do with your own mindset to start accepting these facts no matter how unfair or unwanted they are. Bc your best future and that of your kids will be built on the back of HOW you accept them and what is left after you do.
And that brings you to a deep reflection of what you genuinely think is best for you as a foundation for moving forward from where you are. Bc we can only start from here, can’t we? I don’t know the answer to those deeply personal questions and tbh my opinion doesn’t matter. But yours does and you may not know yet what you think.
It sounds as if your wife is proposing either some kind of legal/financial separation where you stay legally married but where she keeps the house OR some discussion legally mediated by a third party (if that is what she means by mediation) where you try to agree some middle ground OR letting the lawyers fight it out on your behalf. Tbh it sounds most of all as if she is trying to essentially threaten you with two ‘worse’ options if you do not give her what she has consistently wanted and tried to force you to agree with which is her option A of you just moving out and she keeps everything else the same. Which of course is not how RL tends to work, is it? Can you see other options? Can your lawyer? What are the ‘standard’ ways these things work where you live? Or her moving out as she is the one choosing to end the marriage? Another option of course is that you bite the bullet, follow legal advice on how the divorce process works where you live and file yourself if there is an advantage to you in doing so.
What would you do if you accepted that your marriage was over, that you will have to live elsewhere and that you will only have 50% time with your kids as a done deal regardless of which option you take? What option would you take if you were trying to look at it from a five year ahead future you?
We do understand how appallingly painful it is to be where you are….many of us have been there. There is nothing fair or reasonable about it. It comes with a lot of emotion and a lot of grief and loss and a lot of blank future pages at a time when that is the last thing you feel able to look at. I am so sorry bc this s&it is hard. But it is also true that deciding what you can find a way to let go of is what clears the ground for a different future too. And there is one. It may not be better than what you used to have but I can promise you it will be better than today.
But it requires a clear eye about the realities and options of where you are, and a honest assessment of your own motivation about the hills you are prepared to die on if you must. Do you know what those are?
Above all, don’t be drawn into behaving like an a$$hat legally or otherwise, no matter how tempting that is. Imho you are under no obligation to be nice or concerned much about your wife’s feelings or wishes now, other than as they matter legally/practically from a business pov….but nor will your interests or your kids interests be served by taking the low road or denying that you are where you are. Be civil and business like without feeling the need to be nice or kind or emotionally engaged. That probably means limiting direct communication as much as you can and making it as factual, brief and formal as is possible in your current circumstances. Which means let her go and let go of any attempt to persuade her to think or feel differently about the path she has chosen for all of you and let go of any involvement in how the predictable consequences affect her. You have enough to do with focusing on your own baseline priorities and limiting the damage from those predictable consequences on you and your kids as much as you can.
T: 18 M: 12 (at BD) No kids.
H diagnosed with severe depression Oct 15. BD May 16. OW since April 16, maybe earlier. Silent vanisher mostly.
Divorced April 18. XH married ow 6 weeks later.
"Option A is not available so I need to kick the s**t out of Option B" Sheryl Sandberg
Just Getting Started in this Journey 3
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